Common Ground for Rudy and Benny

by
Thomas A. Droleskey

Having been burned just about three years ago now when Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, then the head of the conciliar Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, gave conflicting, contradictory messages concerning the admission of pro-abortion Catholic public officials to what passes for "Holy Communion" in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, I held my fire a few days ago when people were buzzing about Ratzinger's extemporaneous remarks concerning the fact Catholics in public life who support abortion excommunicate themselves from the Church and would "get the punishment they deserve." "The other shoe is going to drop really fast," I said to myself as I read the report online while we stopped to visit with Mrs. Kathleen Plumb, the publisher and editor of The Four Marks, in Billings, Montana, on Wednesday, May 9, 2007. "How long will it be until the 'Vatican' issues a 'clarification'?," I asked myself. It wasn't long at all.

Here is the news story about the matter that appeared on the Catholic News Service website:

SAO PAULO, Brazil (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI's comments on excommunication for pro-abortion Catholic politicians touched on huge and sensitive issues -- so sensitive that the Vatican issued a toned-down version of his remarks the following day.

Speaking with journalists on the plane taking him to Brazil May 9, the pope left the impression that he agreed with those invoking excommunication for Catholic legislators in Mexico City who had voted in April to legalize abortion.

When reporters pressed the pope on whether he supported the excommunication of the Mexican deputies, he answered: "Yes, this excommunication was not something arbitrary, but is foreseen by the Code (of Canon Law). It is simply part of church law that the killing of an innocent baby is incompatible with being in communion with the body of Christ."

Referring to Mexican bishops, the pope continued: "Therefore, they did not do anything new, surprising or arbitrary. They only underlined publicly what is foreseen in (canon) law, a law based on the church's doctrine and faith, on our appreciation for life and for human individuality from the first moment."

On May 10, the Vatican press office released the official transcript of the pope's 25-minute session with reporters. The pope's opening "yes" to the direct question about excommunication had disappeared, and so had the references to Mexican bishops.

The tweaked version of the pope's remarks began: "Excommunication is not something arbitrary, but is foreseen by the Code (of Canon Law.) Therefore, it is simply part of church law that the killing of an innocent baby is incompatible with going to Communion, in which one receives the body of Christ."

In the rest of the edited version, some of the pope's verbs were changed to make his remarks more generic.

Asked about the changes, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, told reporters May 10 that it was routine for the Vatican Secretariat of State to review the pope's extemporaneous remarks and clean them up a little for publication.

That the pope's comments had potential for controversy was apparent immediately after he made them. Father Lombardi quickly circulated among reporters on the plane and told them that the pope was not announcing a new policy on Catholic politicians.

Father Lombardi also noted confusion over what the Mexican bishops had and had not done. The Mexican bishops had not announced the excommunication of anyone, he pointed out.

"And if the bishops haven't excommunicated anyone, it's not that the pope wants to do so," Father Lombardi said.

Later May 9, after consulting with the pope, Father Lombardi said the pontiff was only reiterating the teaching that Catholic legislators who promote initiatives like the legalization of abortion exclude themselves from the conditions needed to participate fully in the Eucharist.

But for many media, those distinctions meant less than the pope's apparent "yes" to the penalty of excommunication for Catholic politicians. The next day's banner headline in one of Brazil's leading newspapers, Folha de Sao Paulo, read simply: "The pope supports the excommunication of pro-abortion politicians."

In Brazil and in several Latin America countries, there are increasing pressures to legalize abortion. Its adoption in Mexico City, which now allows abortion for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, was seen by church leaders as a major defeat.

Some of the church's statements following the vote in Mexico City have appeared inconsistent, however.

Carlos Villa Roiz, a spokesman for Mexico City Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, told Catholic News Service May 9 that the Mexican church did not yet have an official position on the matter.

Immediately before the law's approval April 24, local press quoted a Mexico City archdiocesan statement that said when the law took effect "any baptized assembly members will automatically be excommunicated and therefore be excluded from the Catholic Church."

However, Cardinal Rivera backed off this stance May 6, saying that excommunication was not necessary.

"The only official position of the archdiocese is the one the cardinal announced on Sunday," Villa said. "During Mass, he said that he hadn't considered excommunicating anyone."

Villa added that Mexican clergy were still debating whether the lawmakers had been excommunicated "latae sententiae," meaning excommunication may have been automatic following their vote, with no need for a formal church declaration.

He said Mexican church officials would be ready to follow any orders from the pope.

"When Rome speaks, the discussion is over," Villa said. "Even if Cardinal Rivera hasn't excommunicated them, the pope is making it understood that the legislators have committed a serious, mortal sin."

Politicians who supported the abortion bill have downplayed the excommunication discussions.

Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, a member of the Democratic Revolution Party, told reporters May 9 that he "hadn't lost any sleep" over the possibility of being excommunicated.

"I am going to fulfill my duties," he said. "Above the law, there is nothing more important."

The issue of politicians and Communion has ramifications beyond Mexico.

During the 2004 U.S. presidential election campaign, about 10 to 12 of the approximately 190 diocesan bishops spoke out in favor of denying Communion to politicians who favored abortion. The bishops are scheduled to discuss the issue again this November when they vote on a new statement on "Faithful Citizenship."
Contributing to this story was Jonathan Roeder in Mexico (http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0702642.htm)

One can always (as in always!) count on the conciliar revolutionaries to contradict themselves on matters pertaining to the discipline of pro-abortion Catholic public officials. Too many of the world's conciliar bishops, whose archdioceses and dioceses send oodles and oodles of money to the the Vatican in conciliar captivity, are too supportive of pro-abortion Catholics in public life for there to be any effective and consistent form of discipline imposed by the conciliar officials in the Vatican. Although there are some conciliar bishops in Latin America who are not as "tolerant" as their confreres in North America and Europe, the plain fact of the matter is that the dictates of the conciliarist novelty known as "episcopal collegiality" forbid a conciliar "pontiff" from acting arbitrarily in what conciliarism teaches is solely the realm of diocesan bishops, whose "jurisdiction" must be "protected" from perceived "Roman interference."

Obviously, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Hegelian Ratzinger meant to obfuscate the issue in his extemporaneous remarks onboard the airplane that was taking him from Rome to Brazil last week, knowing full well that his remarks would generate support among "conservative" Catholics. He thus realizes a public relations coup, having made "strong" comments concerning pro-abortion Catholic public officials while at the same time continuing the conciliar Vatican's "hands-off" policy concerning the imposition of any disciplinary measures upon those officials. This is the sorry ecclesiastical equivalent of President George Walker Bush making what appears to be "strong" "pro-life" statements while he appoints pro-aborts to the highest echelons of his administration and campaigns actively for completely pro-abortion Republican candidates for public life, to say nothing of his administration's funding for the chemical assassination of preborn children by means of domestic and international "family planning" programs.

As has been noted in several recent commentaries on this site, believing Catholics in the United States of America have demonstrated themselves to be very gullible for the empty rhetoric of "conservative" politicians and for their enablers in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarsm. This is, after all, but the rotten fruit of Americanism and pluralism, where many, although not all, to be sure, of the legitimate Catholic bishops in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries in the years before the "Second" Vatican Council reaffirmed their flocks in the false belief that the American electoral process represented a means to achieve "progress" in behalf of the common good.

The "false opposites" of the Judeo-Masonic political system in the United States of America have produced two different political "traditions" among American Catholics: the first sees the Democrat Party, which was the instrument of political socialization for Catholics in the Nineteenth Century as nativists attacked Catholic immigrants, as the means of "social justice" while the second sees the Republican Party, which began its life as part and parcel of the nativist attack upon Catholic immigrants the means to retard the social evils advanced by the Democrat Party. Thus two sets of conciliar bishops are pitted against each other frequently, giving believing Catholics the same false hope that "something" is being done in the conciliar structures to defend truth that they have in the political system, which produces one phony "pro-life politician after another, each of whom supports the chemical murder of preborn children and most of whom support the surgical dismemberment of preborn children in at least some cases. The devil delights in this gigantic sleight of hand, knowing that most Catholics will fail to recognize the fact that the existence of social evils under cover of civil law is the result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King that is heralded by the scions of conciliarism such as Joseph Ratzinger as "reconciliation" with the "principles of 1789."

Thus, you see, all efforts by the conciliarists to denounce (and to revise their denunciations) the social evils of the day ring hollow because they refuse to admit that the promotion of those evils under cover of law and in every aspect of popular culture is the direct, inexorable result of abdicating belief in the necessity of restoring Christendom as the foundation of personal and social order. A political system founded in the lies of naturalism or inter-denominationalism or nondenominational leads to the triumph of every form of decadence. Pope Leo XIII pointed this out in Tametsi Futura Prospicientibus, November 1, 1900:

God alone is Life. All other beings partake of life, but are not life. Christ, from all eternity and by His very nature, is "the Life," just as He is the Truth, because He is God of God. From Him, as from its most sacred source, all life pervades and ever will pervade creation. Whatever is, is by Him; whatever lives, lives by Him. For by the Word "all things were made; and without Him was made nothing that was made." This is true of the natural life; but, as We have sufficiently indicated above, we have a much higher and better life, won for us by Christ's mercy, that is to say, "the life of grace," whose happy consummation is "the life of glory," to which all our thoughts and actions ought to be directed. The whole object of Christian doctrine and morality is that "we being dead to sin, should live to justice" (I Peter ii., 24)-that is, to virtue and holiness. In this consists the moral life, with the certain hope of a happy eternity. This justice, in order to be advantageous to salvation, is nourished by Christian faith. "The just man liveth by faith" (Galatians iii., II). "Without faith it is impossible to please God" (Hebrews xi., 6). Consequently Jesus Christ, the creator and preserver of faith, also preserves and nourishes our moral life. This He does chiefly by the ministry of His Church. To Her, in His wise and merciful counsel, He has entrusted certain agencies which engender the supernatural life, protect it, and revive it if it should fail. This generative and conservative power of the virtues that make for salvation is therefore lost, whenever morality is dissociated from divine faith. A system of morality based exclusively on human reason robs man of his highest dignity and lowers him from the supernatural to the merely natural life. Not but that man is able by the right use of reason to know and to obey certain principles of the natural law. But though he should know them all and keep them inviolate through life-and even this is impossible without the aid of the grace of our Redeemer-still it is vain for anyone without faith to promise himself eternal salvation. "If anyone abide not in Me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him up and cast him into the fire, and he burneth" john xv., 6). "He that believeth not shall be condemned" (Mark xvi., 16). We have but too much evidence of the value and result of a morality divorced from divine faith. How is it that, in spite of all the zeal for the welfare of the masses, nations are in such straits and even distress, and that the evil is daily on the increase? We are told that society is quite able to help itself; that it can flourish without the assistance of Christianity, and attain its end by its own unaided efforts. Public administrators prefer a purely secular system of government. All traces of the religion of our forefathers are daily disappearing from political life and administration. What blindness! Once the idea of the authority of God as the Judge of right and wrong is forgotten, law must necessarily lose its primary authority and justice must perish: and these are the two most powerful and most necessary bonds of society. Similarly, once the hope and expectation of eternal happiness is taken away, temporal goods will be greedily sought after. Every man will strive to secure the largest share for himself. Hence arise envy, jealousy, hatred. The consequences are conspiracy, anarchy, nihilism. There is neither peace abroad nor security at home. Public life is stained with crime.

Modernity produced the secular, religiously indifferentist civil state and all of its crimes against God and the souls for whom He shed every. Modernism has reaffirmed the monstrous civil state, attempting to fight various social evils institutionalized therein with the same naturalist principles that created it in the first place. This never-ending cycle of the advance of evil by the civil state and conciliarism's tepid, naturalist, Modernist approach to the retardation of evil produces an odd sort of common ground between pro-abortion Catholics in public life and the conciliarist officials, both of which have excommunicated themselves from the Catholic Church for, among many other reasons, precisely the fact that they reject the immutable Social Teaching of the Catholic Church on the necessity of establishing and fostering the confessionally Catholic civil state.

Take Rudolph William Giuliani, for example, who is currently give new "voice," if you will, to the old line, popularized in the State of New York first by then Governor Hugh L. Carey from 1974 to 1982 and then by Carey's successor, Mario Matthew Cuomo, from 1982 to 1994, that one can be "personally opposed" to the killing of preborn children under cover of law but not seek to "impose" "his" concept of morality upon others. Truth is never imposed. It exists in the nature of things. A physical truth binds our bodies, for example, whether or not we admit that it does. Moral truths bind our souls whether or not we admit that they do. It is not an imposition of anything upon anyone merely to insist that what is objectively true be recognized as the foundation of personal order and hence of social justice in the pursuit of the common temporal good as it relates to the conquest of man's Last End. We must adhere at all times and in all places to the totality of the Catholic Faith, which encompasses all of God's Revelation and the natural law that flows from His Divine positive law, without any exception or deviation whatsoever. Pope Leo XIII put the matter this way in Immortale Dei, November 1, 1885:

Hence, lest concord be broken by rash charges, let this be understood by all, that the integrity of Catholic faith cannot be reconciled with opinions verging on naturalism or rationalism, the essence of which is utterly to do away with Christian institutions and to install in society the supremacy of man to the exclusion of God. Further, it is unlawful to follow one line of conduct in private life and another in public, respecting privately the authority of the Church, but publicly rejecting it; for this would amount to joining together good and evil, and to putting man in conflict with himself; whereas he ought always to be consistent, and never in the least point nor in any condition of life to swerve from Christian virtue.

Although he has been enabled by the likes of the late John Cardinal O'Connor and Edward Cardinal Egan and a litany of lesser known conciliar clerics, including his boyhood friend and enabler of pederasts in the Diocese of Rockville Centre, Monsignor Alan Placa, Rudolph William Giuliani long ago excommunicated himself from the Catholic Church for his support of two of the sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance. While it is one thing to sin and be sorry and to seek out Absolution in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, it is quite another to persist in sin unrepentantly, worse yet to promote it under cover of law and in every aspect of popular culture. One cannot say he loves Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ while he promotes as a "civil right" the very thing, sin, that caused Him to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death and which caused His Most Blessed Mother's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart to be thrust through and through with Seven Swords of Sorrow. Giuliani is a dissenter from the Received Teaching of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. He has indeed placed himself outside of the pale of Holy Mother Church because of his support of the surgical and chemical murders of the preborn.

What is true for Rudolph William Giuliani is also true of Joseph Ratzinger, who dissents from any number of matters contained in the Deposit of Faith, including this simple reiteration of Catholic social teaching found in (yes, once again, my friends) Pope Saint Pius X's Vehementer Nos, February 11, 1906:

That the State must be separated from the Church is a thesis absolutely false, a most pernicious error. Based, as it is, on the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult, it is in the first place guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own. We owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him. Besides, this thesis is an obvious negation of the supernatural order. It limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only, which is but the proximate object of political societies; and it occupies itself in no fashion (on the plea that this is foreign to it) with their ultimate object which is man's eternal happiness after this short life shall have run its course. But as the present order of things is temporary and subordinated to the conquest of man's supreme and absolute welfare, it follows that the civil power must not only place no obstacle in the way of this conquest, but must aid us in effecting it. The same thesis also upsets the order providentially established by God in the world, which demands a harmonious agreement between the two societies. Both of them, the civil and the religious society, although each exercises in its own sphere its authority over them. It follows necessarily that there are many things belonging to them in common in which both societies must have relations with one another. Remove the agreement between Church and State, and the result will be that from these common matters will spring the seeds of disputes which will become acute on both sides; it will become more difficult to see where the truth lies, and great confusion is certain to arise. Finally, this thesis inflicts great injury on society itself, for it cannot either prosper or last long when due place is not left for religion, which is the supreme rule and the sovereign mistress in all questions touching the rights and the duties of men. Hence the Roman Pontiffs have never ceased, as circumstances required, to refute and condemn the doctrine of the separation of Church and State. Our illustrious predecessor, Leo XIII, especially, has frequently and magnificently expounded Catholic teaching on the relations which should subsist between the two societies. "Between them," he says, "there must necessarily be a suitable union, which may not improperly be compared with that existing between body and soul.-"Quaedam intercedat necesse est ordinata colligatio (inter illas) quae quidem conjunctioni non immerito comparatur, per quam anima et corpus in homine copulantur." He proceeds: "Human societies cannot, without becoming criminal, act as if God did not exist or refuse to concern themselves with religion, as though it were something foreign to them, or of no purpose to them.... As for the Church, which has God Himself for its author, to exclude her from the active life of the nation, from the laws, the education of the young, the family, is to commit a great and pernicious error. -- "Civitates non possunt, citra scellus, gerere se tamquam si Deus omnino non esset, aut curam religionis velut alienam nihilque profuturam abjicere.... Ecclesiam vero, quam Deus ipse constituit, ab actione vitae excludere, a legibus, ab institutione adolescentium, a societate domestica, magnus et perniciousus est error."

Pope Pius XI made it clear in Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, that one cannot dissent from the social teaching of the Church:

Many believe in or claim that they believe in and hold fast to Catholic doctrine on such questions as social authority, the right of owning private property, on the relations between capital and labor, on the rights of the laboring man, on the relations between Church and State, religion and country, on the relations between the different social classes, on international relations, on the rights of the Holy See and the prerogatives of the Roman Pontiff and the Episcopate, on the social rights of Jesus Christ, Who is the Creator, Redeemer, and Lord not only of individuals but of nations. In spite of these protestations, they speak, write, and, what is more, act as if it were not necessary any longer to follow, or that they did not remain still in full force, the teachings and solemn pronouncements which may be found in so many documents of the Holy See, and particularly in those written by Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV.

There is a species of moral, legal, and social modernism which We condemn, no less decidedly than We condemn theological modernism.

It is necessary ever to keep in mind these teachings and pronouncements which We have made; it is no less necessary to reawaken that spirit of faith, of supernatural love, and of Christian discipline which alone can bring to these principles correct understanding, and can lead to their observance. This is particularly important in the case of youth, and especially those who aspire to the priesthood, so that in the almost universal confusion in which we live they at least, as the Apostle writes, will not be "tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive." (Ephesians iv, 14)

Much like the arrogant pro-abortion Catholics in public life in the United States of America and elsewhere in the world, Joseph Ratzinger believes he is exempt from all previous condemnations. He made this clear when he was a yong priest:

Regarding the Christian faith, the thing that really troubles us is largely the burden of the plethora of theses accumulated in the course of history that now present themselves all together to man demanding faith. ...

Fundamentally, people want to be liberated from this [the world of planning] just as much as from the old-fashioned faith which, by its contradiction to modern knowledge, has become such an oppressive burden to them. (Joseph Ratzinger, Faith and Future, 1970, as found on Tradition in Action website at
Fr. Ratzinger: Catholic Faith is "an oppressive burden")

This is why Ratzinger could say the following some twenty years later, indicating that he is not all bound by previous dogmatic pronouncements and papal encyclical letters:

The text [of the Second Vatican Council] also presents the various forms of bonds that rise from the different degrees of magisterial teaching. It affirms -- perhaps for the first time with this clarity -- that there are decisions of the Magisterium that cannot be a last word on the matter as such, but are, in a substantial fixation of the problem, above all an expression of pastoral prudence, a kind of provisional disposition. Its nucleus remains valid, but the particulars, which the circumstances of the times have influenced, may need further ramifications.

“In this regard, one may think of the declarations of Popes in the last century about religious liberty, as well as the anti-Modernist decisions at the beginning of this century, above all, the decisions of the Biblical Commission of the time. As a cry of alarm in the face of hasty and superficial adaptations, they will remain fully justified. A personage such as Johann Baptist Metz said, for example, that the Church's anti-Modernist decisions render the great service of preserving her from immersion in the liberal-bourgeois world. But in the details of the determinations they contain, they become obsolete after having fulfilled their pastoral mission at the proper moment.” (L'Osservatore Romano, July 2, 1990)

Nor must it be thought that what is expounded in Encyclical Letters does not of itself demand consent, since in writing such Letters the Popes do not exercise the supreme power of their Teaching Authority. For these matters are taught with the ordinary teaching authority, of which it is true to say: "He who heareth you, heareth me"; and generally what is expounded and inculcated in Encyclical Letters already for other reasons appertains to Catholic doctrine. But if the Supreme Pontiffs in their official documents purposely pass judgment on a matter up to that time under dispute, it is obvious that that matter, according to the mind and will of the same Pontiffs, cannot be any longer considered a question open to discussion among theologians.

And one of those old dogmatic councils, the Vatican Council (1869-1870), put the lie to the belief that one can "understand" dogmatic truths "differently" with the passage of time in accord with the exigencies of a given historical moment and the "needs" of "modern" man:

Hence, that meaning of the sacred dogmata is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by Holy Mother Church, and there must never be an abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.... If anyone says that it is possible that at some given time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmata propounded by the Church which is different from that which the Church has always understood and understands: let him be anathema.

Yes, pro-abortion Catholics in public life such as Rudolph William Giuliani have much in common with conciliarist such as Joseph Ratzinger: both groups of Catholics have expelled themselves from the Catholic Church. Both groups of Catholics support the Judeo-Masonic concept of the separation of Church and State, denounced by Pope Pius XI as a thesis that is absolutely false. Both groups of Catholics believe that past dogmatic pronouncements and papal decrees do not bind their consciences. While one group supports evils opposed by the other, both believe that the Catholic Church must not be accorded any special privileges by the civil state and has no role to play in the nullification of legislation or judicial decisions contrary to the good of souls. Both groups of Catholics fall into the description of ex-Catholics as provided by Pope Leo XIII in Satis Cognitum, June 29, 1896:

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavour than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition" (Auctor Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos).

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore :, drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88).

The need of this divinely instituted means for the preservation of unity, about which we speak is urged by St. Paul in his epistle to the Ephesians. In this he first admonishes them to preserve with every care concord of minds: "Solicitous to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Eph. iv., 3, et seq.). And as souls cannot be perfectly united in charity unless minds agree in faith, he wishes all to hold the same faith: "One Lord, one faith," and this so perfectly one as to prevent all danger of error: "that henceforth we be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive" (Eph. iv., 14): and this he teaches is to be observed, not for a time only - "but until we all meet in the unity of faith...unto the measure of the age of the fullness of Christ" (13). But, in what has Christ placed the primary principle, and the means of preserving this unity? In that - "He gave some Apostles - and other some pastors and doctors, for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ"

Pro-abortion Catholic politicians do not hold the Faith of our fathers. Neither do the conciliarists, personified in such an exemplary manner by Joseph Ratzinger. There is indeed much common ground between these two sets of "false opposites" in the structures of the counterfeit church of conciliarism.

We must continue to beseech Our Lady of Fatima to plead with her Divine Son to take the chastisement of the present moment away from us as the fruit of the Triumph of her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. Although a separate article will be posted tomorrow, May 13, 2007, on the ninetieth anniversary of Our Lady's first apparition in the Cova da Iria in Fatima, suffice it to say for the present moment that the many of the errors of Modernity in the world and the errors of Modernism in the conciliar structures are very much related to the errors of Russia, dating back to the time of the emergence of the Orthodox schism, especially concerning the nature of the proper relationship between Church and State. We must endeavor to keep Our Lady's Fatima Message in our lives, especially by our daily recitation of her Most Holy Rosary, as we try to plant a few seeds for the day when everyone on the face of the earth will have common ground with only one thing, the Catholic Faith as it has been handed down us through the centuries without any shadow of change or alteration by the conciliarists.

Viva Cristo Rey!

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Nereus, Achilleus, Pancras and Domatilla, pray for us.

Saint Robert Bellarmine, pray for us.

Saint Athanasius, pray for us.

Saints Monica, pray for us.

Saint Jude, pray for us.

Saint John the Beloved, pray for us.

Saint Francis Solano, pray for us.

Saint John Bosco, pray for us.

Saint Dominic Savio, pray for us.

Saint Scholastica, pray for us.

Saint Benedict, pray for us.

Saint Anthony of Padua, pray for us.

Saint Antony of the Desert, pray for us.

Saint Francis of Assisi, pray for us.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, pray for us.

Saint Bonaventure, pray for us.

Saint Augustine, pray for us.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, pray for us.

Saint Francis Xavier, pray for us.

Saint Peter Damian, pray for us.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, pray for us.

Saint Lucy, pray for us.

Saint Monica, pray for us.

Saint Agatha, pray for us.

Saint Philomena, pray for us.

Saint Cecilia, pray for us.

Saint John Mary Vianney, pray for us.

Saint Vincent de Paul, pray for us.

Saint Vincent Ferrer, pray for us.

Saint Athanasius, pray for us.

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, pray for us.

Saint Isaac Jogues, pray for us.

Saint Rene Goupil, pray for us.

Saint John Lalonde, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel Lalemont, pray for us.

Saint Noel Chabanel, pray for us.

Saint Charles Garnier, pray for us.

Saint Anthony Daniel, pray for us.

Saint John DeBrebeuf, pray for us.

Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, pray for us.

Saint Dominic, pray for us.

Saint Hyacinth, pray for us.

Saint Basil, pray for us.

Saint Vincent Ferrer, pray for us.

Saint Sebastian, pray for us.

Saint Tarcisius, pray for us.

Saint Bridget of Sweden, pray for us.

Saint Gerard Majella, pray for us.

Saint John of the Cross, pray for us.

Saint Teresa of Avila, pray for us.

Saint Bernadette Soubirous, pray for us.

Saint Genevieve, pray for us.

Saint Vincent de Paul, pray for us.

Pope Saint Pius X, pray for us

Pope Saint Pius V, pray for us.

Saint Rita of Cascia, pray for us.

Saint Louis de Montfort, pray for us.

Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich, pray for us.

Venerable Pauline Jaricot, pray for us.

Father Miguel Augustin Pro, pray for us.

Francisco Marto, pray for us.

Jacinta Marto, pray for us.

Juan Diego, pray for us.

The Longer Version of the Saint Michael the Archangel Prayer, composed by Pope Leo XIII, 1888

O glorious Archangel Saint Michael, Prince of the heavenly host, be our defense in the terrible warfare which we carry on against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, spirits of evil. Come to the aid of man, whom God created immortal, made in His own image and likeness, and redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil. Fight this day the battle of our Lord, together with the holy angels, as already thou hast fought the leader of the proud angels, Lucifer, and his apostate host, who were powerless to resist thee, nor was there place for them any longer in heaven. That cruel, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil or Satan who seduces the whole world, was cast into the abyss with his angels. Behold this primeval enemy and slayer of men has taken courage. Transformed into an angel of light, he wanders about with all the multitude of wicked spirits, invading the earth in order to blot out the Name of God and of His Christ, to seize upon, slay, and cast into eternal perdition, souls destined for the crown of eternal glory. That wicked dragon pours out. as a most impure flood, the venom of his malice on men of depraved mind and corrupt heart, the spirit of lying, of impiety, of blasphemy, and the pestilent breath of impurity, and of every vice and iniquity. These most crafty enemies have filled and inebriated with gall and bitterness the Church, the spouse of the Immaculate Lamb, and have laid impious hands on Her most sacred possessions. In the Holy Place itself, where has been set up the See of the most holy Peter and the Chair of Truth for the light of the world, they have raised the throne of their abominable impiety with the iniquitous design that when the Pastor has been struck the sheep may be scattered. Arise then, O invincible Prince, bring help against the attacks of the lost spirits to the people of God, and give them the victory. They venerate thee as their protector and patron; in thee holy Church glories as her defense against the malicious powers of hell; to thee has God entrusted the souls of men to be established in heavenly beatitude. Oh, pray to the God of peace that He may put Satan under our feet, so far conquered that he may no longer be able to hold men in captivity and harm the Church. Offer our prayers in the sight of the Most High, so that they may quickly conciliate the mercies of the Lord; and beating down the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, do thou again make him captive in the abyss, that he may no longer seduce the nations. Amen.

Verse: Behold the Cross of the Lord; be scattered ye hostile powers.

Response: The Lion of the Tribe of Juda has conquered the root of David.

Verse: Let Thy mercies be upon us, O Lord.

Response: As we have hoped in Thee.

Verse: O Lord hear my prayer.

Response: And let my cry come unto Thee.

Verse: Let us pray. O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we call upon Thy holy Name, and as suppliants, we implore Thy clemency, that by the intercession of Mary, ever Virgin, immaculate and our Mother, and of the glorious Archangel Saint Michael, Thou wouldst deign to help us against Satan and all other unclean spirits, who wander about the world for the injury of the human race and the ruin of our souls.